In one pragmatic way of looking at it, there was a lot of improvising. The Tsarist government fell in February, replaced with a liberal government that immediately squandered much of what credibility it had by dedicating itself to continuing the now very unpopular war. The workers councils ("soviets") formed a kind of parallel government to Kerensky's official one. And when the soviets gave the Bolsheviks a majority, that was the basis of legitimacy on which Lenin relied in taking power in October.
They immediately faced an issue with the Constituent Assembly elections in October.
George Kennan relates the background results of the elections in November in Russia Leaves the War (1956). The February Revolution, which Kennan refers to as March in the following, had set up plans for a Constituent Assembly:
When the first Russian Revolution occurred, in March 1917, one of the basic points in the political program of the first provisional ministry had been the early convening of a constitutional convention, or "constituent assembly" as it was usually called in English usage, to determine the permanent form of national government. The intention to hold a constituent assembly accorded with the wishes of every major political party and faction operating in Russia during the period of the Provisional Government. It was the basis of the very expression "provisional government." The parties of the left, including the Bolsheviki, not only subscribed to the principle of holding such an assembly, but demanded it — repeatedly and insistently.There was an Election Commission working on scheduling the election for it at the time the October Revolution took place.
Here's where its worth remembering that revolutions are revolutions. When they take place outside the established official order - which is not a requirement for a revolution to be an actual revolution - then they are faced with the task of constructing a new regular order with some new elements and some adaptations of the old government.
Here the example of Venezuela in the summer of 2017 is a useful approach to conceptualizing this. Hugo Chávez styled his government as a revolutionary one, the "Bolivarian Revolution." He was repeatedly re-elected as President and carried forward wide-ranging economic reforms, including exerting full public control over the PDVSA, the national oil company. Even after the 2002 US-backed coup against him fizzled, he maintained an electoral government and the national Constitution. He deferred plans for a new Constitution, judging that there wasn't public backing for it. But his government's policies were shaped by the known hostility of the US against him, which became more pronounced under the Obama Administration, whose Latin American policies were generally sharply conservative. The Cuban anti-Communist groups in the US made Venezuelan regime change a special project, which was eagerly championed by Republicans like Florida Sen Marco Rubio.
When Chavez died in 2013, a new Presidential election brought Nicolás Maduro to power by a narrow but clear margin in a highly competitive election. The opposition became increasingly militant, and the Venezuelan petrostate was hard hit by the worldwide slump in oil prices, causing new economic distresses. The Obama Administration heightened the pressure by declaring Venezuela a threat to US national security, a fairly absurd description on its face, but necessary to invoke the legal sanctions Obama had determined to impose on Venezuelan officials. The rightwing opposition became increasingly militant over time, with violent demonstrations a common occurrence by 2017. By this year, the CIA Director was talking openly about the US providing aid to supposedly democratic opposition groups. The Trump Administration even threatened military intervention.
Maduro's government decided to proceed with the process of creating a new Constitution, presenting it as a way to reconcile the pro- and anti-government factions on a peaceful basis. When the National Assembly authorized a referendum on setting up a Constituent Assembly that would prepare a new Constitution, the opposition boycotted the referendum. They and their American allies demanded that the referendum not be held. Afterward, the fact that the referendum had been carried out was used by the opposition to denounced Maduro's government as illegitimate, including the Trump Administration, which used it as an excuse to push for additional sanctions.
The Russian Constituent Assembly is mentioned in this report on Abby Martin's Empire Files program on the left TeleSUR network, Venezuela's Constituent Assembly: Dictatorship or Democracy? 08/29/2017:
I don't take this as an analogy. But it's another example of a case in which a government in a precarious position had to make practical decisions around a Constituent Assembly that carried some kind of official legitimacy but one which very much subject to being contested among the contending parties.
Kennan relates what happened when the Constituent Assembly election took place on November 25, 1917:
The Electoral Commission itself Electoral Commission "refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Bolshevik seizure of power, and continued to implement preparations for the election in accordance with the instructions of the defunct Provisional Government. This procedure was viewed with sharpest misgiving by the Bolshevik authorities, but they did not seriously interfere.The Bolsheviks' misgivings proved to be well-founded:
The result was highly unfavorable to the Bolsheviki. Out of a total of 707 deputies elected, 410 were Social-Revolutionaries, only 175 Bolsheviki. Even with the addition of the Left S-R's, who at that time split away from their own party and joined with the Bolsheviki, the Bolshevik faction still had the support of less than a third of the body. The Bolsheviki, as was to be expected, proved to have their strength in the big cities, where the moderate conservative parties ran them a close second. But the peasantry, by far the most numerous segment of the population, voted almost solidly for the S-R's [Socialist Revolutionaries].Kennan describes the November 25 elections rather grandly. "They represented the first sounding of the popular will ever conducted in Russia under rules comparable to those which prevail under western parliamentary systems. That they were, in general, honestly held and that they constituted a faithful reflection of the feelings of the voters does not appear to have been seriously challenged by historians of the Revolution."
The official Soviet histories did not see the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly as quite the historical tragedy that Kennan portrays. In the official 1939 Stalinist History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) - Short Course, the dismissal is described briefly:
In order to consolidate the Soviet power, the old, bourgeois state machine had to be shattered and destroyed and a new, Soviet state machine set up in its place. Further, it was necessary to destroy the survivals of the division of society into estates and the regime of national oppression, to abolish the privileges of the church, to suppress the counter-revolutionary press and counter-revolutionary organizations of all kinds, legal and illegal, and to dissolve the bourgeois Constituent Assembly. ...The Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, where the Constituent Assembly convened in January. Kennan writes that by December "the control of the Assembly was in the main a battle between two strongly leftist parties: the S-R's, who had the majority in the Assembly, and the Bolsheviki, who controlled the city streets."
The Ministries were abolished and replaced by Soviet administrative machinery and appropriate People's Commissariats. The Supreme Council of National Economy was set up to administer the industry of the country. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Vecheka) was created to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, and F. Dzerzhinsky was placed at its head. The formation of a Red Army and Navy was decreed. The Constituent Assembly, the elections to which had largely been held prior to the October Revolution, and which refused to recognize the decrees of the Second Congress of Soviets on peace, land and the transfer of power to the Soviets, was dissolved.
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| Pro-Constituent Assembly demonstrators - January 5, 1918 |
At this stage, it would be difficult to distinguish ideology from expediency in the actions taken. The Bolshevik government tried hard to intimidate the SR's in the leadup to the first meeting of the Assembly. Kennan:
As more of the deputies began to arrive in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki neglected no steps to impress upon them the danger in which they would be placing themselves if they dared to take action not consistent with Bolshevik purposes.8 On December 26, the Pravda published a set of "theses," drafted by Lenin, on the subject of the Constituent Assembly. In this document the shift of Bolshevik policy toward the Assembly was rationalized on grounds convincing only to those who shared a belief in the ultimate righteousness of the Bolshevik cause and held that this justified an unlimited policy of expediency. "The interests of this revolution," Lenin wrote, "stand over the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly." He warned brutally that a complete endorsement by the Assembly of the legitimacy and actions to date of the Soviet regime would be the only "painless solution" of the crisis that had arisen; if this course were not taken, the crisis would have to be resolvedIn those Theses On The Constituent Assembly, Lenin argued on pragramatic grounds that the process "is taking place under conditions which preclude the possibility of the elections to this Constituent Assembly faithfully expressing the will of the people in general and of the working people in particular." And he argued on the basis of Marxist theory, "the Republic of Soviets (of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies) is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly), but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to socialism." He also stressed the urgent priority of getting Russia out of the world war:
... only in the revolutionary manner, only by the most energetic, swift, firm, and decisive revolutionary measures. ...
One of the particularly acute problems of national life is the problem of peace. A really revolutionary struggle for peace began in Russia only after the victory of the October 25 Revolution, and the first fruits of this victory were the publication of the secret treaties, the conclusion of an armistice, and the beginning of open negotiations for a general peace without annexations and indemnities.When the Assembly finally convened, the arguments between the two sides were contentious, to put it mildly. Kennan gives this memorable description of Lenin at the session:
Only now are the broad sections of the people actually receiving a chance fully and openly to observe the policy of revolutionary struggle for peace and to study its results.
At the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly the mass of the people had no such chance.
It is clear that the discrepancy between the composition of the elected Constituent Assembly and the actual will of the people on the question of terminating the war is inevitable from this point of view too.
Lenin himself was present, and acted as master of ceremonies for his faction. It was plain to observers that every nerve of his politically impassioned being was aroused by this supreme parliamentary contest. His face deathly pale with tenseness, his burning eyes darting constantly over the scene and absorbing every detail, he directed his cohorts like a commander in battle, whenever there was any chance of their dominating the proceedings. When opposition speakers had the floor, he stretched out at full length on the steps leading to the podium and reinforced the harassing operations of his followers by appearing to go to sleep out of sheer boredom.The following morning, the Soviet government officially dissolved the Assembly. "Thus ended Russia's one and only constitutional convention," writes Kennan.
In his speech to the Party's Central Executive Committee on January 19 (Jan 6 old calendar), Lenin offered this defense of dissolving the Assembly:
In the course of a revolution called forth by the strength of the Soviets there are certain to be all kinds of errors and blunders. But everybody knows that revolutionary movements are always and inevitably accompanied by temporary chaos, destruction and disorder. Bourgeois society is the same war, the same shambles; and it was this circumstance that gave rise to and accentuated the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. Those who point out that we are now “dissolving“ the Constituent Assembly although at one time we defended it are not displaying a grain of sense, but are merely uttering pompous and meaningless phrases. At one time, we considered the Constituent Assembly to be better than tsarism and the republic of Kerensky with their famous organs of power; but as the Soviets emerged, they, being revolutionary organisations of the whole people, naturally became incomparably superior to any parliament in the world, a fact that I emphasised as far back as last April. By completely smashing bourgeois and landed property and by facilitating the final upheaval which is sweeping away all traces of the bourgeois system, the Soviets impelled us on to the path that has led the people to organise their own lives. We have taken up this great work of organisation, and it is well that we have done so. Of course, the socialist revolution cannot be immediately presented to the people in a clean, neat and impeccable form; it will inevitably be accompanied by civil war, sabotage and resistance. Those who assert the contrary are either liars or cowards. (Stormy applause.) [my emphasis in bold]When he spoke at that point of "civil war, sabotage and resistance," he was describing the immediate situation. Over the following decades when Lenin's words had taken on canonical status for Communists, statements like this by Lenin would become items in elaborate disputes among left factions and for opponents of socialism.
In this speech, which offers Lenin's overview of the previous year's revolutionary process, he concludes with this explanation of dissolving the Assembly:
To hand over power to the Constituent Assembly would again be compromising with the malignant bourgeoisie. The Russian Soviets place the interests of the working people far above the interests of a treacherous policy of compromise disguised in a new garb. The speeches of those outdated politicians, Chernov and Tsereteli, who continue whining tediously for the cessation of civil war, give off the stale and musty odour of antiquity. But as long as Kaledin exists, and as long as the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly“ conceals the slogan “Down with Soviet power“, civil war is inevitable. For nothing in the world will make us give up Soviet power! (Stormy applause.) And when the Constituent Assembly again revealed its readiness to post-pont’ all the painfully urgent problems and tasks that were placed before it by the Soviets, we told the Constituent Assembly that they must not be postponed for one single moment. And by the will of Soviet power the Constituent Assembly, which has refused to recognise the power of the people, is being dissolved. The Byabushinskys have lost their stakes; their attempts at resistance will only accentuate and provoke a new outbreak of civil war.
The Constituent Assembly is dissolved. The Soviet revolutionary republic will triumph, no matter what. the cost. (Stormy applause. Ovation.)
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